 So I'm pleased to announce our last speaker for the day for the morning keynotes And then we get you to the track sessions So I'm pleased to have Amir Kholman here Amir is chair of the open data governance board in Ireland and an advisor to the Irish Government in terms of what they do with open data and how they think about it I think you're giving an interesting take on that from her perspective right of how they think of data. So Amir Welcome welcome to a dupe summit to Dublin today. Thank you Wonderful Hi everybody So as a kind of a geeky Irish woman living in London, this is a double win for me This is I get to come home and I get to speak at a dupe. So that's really wonderful What I'm going to talk to you well before I start I should probably say to you that I've had four areas that I've worked in in my career so far. So I've worked in the arts I've worked as a journalist. I've worked in governance and I've worked in technology But it's only recently that those four things have come together as part of my research into what I'm calling techno ethics and What is techno ethics? Well, you probably all would have different definitions of it, but for me, it's really about three things It's about people Privacy and profit and I'm going to come back to that in a few minutes, but first I'd like to go back to the arts briefly so The golden ratio is the secret mathematics behind beauty and Artists have used it for many years to determine the most aesthetically pleasing proportions for their work So if we look at Michelangelo's creating of Adam the space between God's finger tip and Adam's finger tip is the point Where the golden ratio divides? So it's interesting to think that artists use mathematics as part of their creative work Interesting, but not so surprising. So Paul Graham in hackers and painters says that technologists and artists share many things Mostly because they want to make good things But that's where I think the similarities between artists and technologists end Because all of you in this room here today working in the technology community Have more power to affect societal change Than Michelangelo could ever have dreamed of when he painted the creation of Adam Mark Anderson said software is eating the world and All of you in this room today are involved in creating that software But I wonder how much time you spend Thinking about the profound impact that you're having Because make no mistake. You're literally engineering the future economic and social well-being of your fellow man more importantly You've moved from being just engineers into social engineers and the history of social engineering has never been great for human kind and In the past when we thought about social engineering It's really what was undertaken by government Totalitarian regimes, but regimes that were subject to change through collective action or democratic force So when I worked in government, I worked in local government I've worked in city hall where I set up the London data store and I've worked in Whitehall I was always amused when people would say to me how concerned they were about the amount of data that government held And at that time the amount of data government had was pretty reasonable So I used to say shouldn't you be more worried about what your mobile network operator has on you But now we know things have changed only we know that the pitch has been leveled and Governments have a huge amount of information about us Which I think has severe implications for society in the UK at the moment We have legislation pending which you will have heard of probably called the snoopers charter And if that legislation is enacted that will give the UK government More visibility of our data than has ever been seen in the past Our Prime Minister in the UK David Cameron said do we really mean to have communication between people which we cannot read I Find that you know an outstanding a gland of statement for the head of a democratic country to say So is it any wonder when a former lieutenant of the stasi was asked What did he think of the snoopers charter in the K UK? He said, you know, this would have been a dream for us so much information on so many people but What the stasi had? Pails into it pales by comparison with what technology companies know about us today and why does that matter? Well, it matters because in order to have successful social engineering by which I mean governments or corporations Trying to make us do things to meet their ends You need to have two things You need to have a body of information about the society you want to influence and the tools of which to do it So let's think about that for a moment So this is what Google has about you if you're a Gmail user This is what they know concepts and topics discussed in email as well as email attachments The content of websites that users have visited Demographic information including income sex race marital status geographic information psychographic information Personality type values attitudes interests and lifestyle interests previous searches users have made information about documents user viewed That is a body of information about society that's unprecedented. It's historically unprecedented But it's not just of course Gmail it's Facebook So we know as far back as 2012 Facebook were undertaking secret studies manipulating emotions from user feeds over 689,000 user feeds without their permission Where are the ethical boundaries or ethical frameworks that bound this kind of research all academic research is bounded by ethical frameworks, but not this So essentially we're living in what the author Frank Pascale calls the black box society Where secret algorithms control the flow of money and information? Those of you who have seen the last season sir. I'm just gonna step to get some water Apologies Those of you who have seen last Season of House of Cards Will be familiar with the fictitious search engine poly hop Which was used by Frank Redwood by his Republican opponent will Conway to basically You know gain the upper hand So he seeded the web with only great information about himself only positive information about himself And he used the search engine and all the data from its users to figure out the values and attitudes and beliefs of those users So he could craft his communication messages accordingly But this is really art's imitating life If we look at the work of Dr. Robert Epstein from the American Institute of Behavioral Research and Technology His five experiments five studies in two separate countries have shown that the real-life equivalent of polyhop Google Could affect voter preference by 20% That's 20% That's a virtually invisible form of social influence that's unregulated in anywhere anywhere When I worked in local government for example, we had very clear guidelines from the electoral Commission Which laid down what we could and couldn't communicate in the period leading up to an election and that was important Because it was important for us as public officials not to do anything not to communicate anything That would disadvantage one political party over another and that's how it should be in a democracy But what if a rogue employee in Google or the company itself decided to skew the algorithm so it ranked one politicians ranking higher than another In an analog world a politician could go to the electoral commission and seek redress But what redress do we have in this black box society? How could we even show the effects of the search engine? manipulation and This has been the subject of some controversy in the UK When users pointed out if you search for labor you got some pretty non-complimentary autocompletes Whereas if you search for conservative you didn't get anything Now Google of course genetic conspiracy, and I'm not saying there is one What I'm saying is that technology has the ability to make Significant societal change with geopolitical consequences and those processes and decisions are hidden from us I'd like to move now to talk briefly about techno ethics in the context of work because we've got some pretty big questions We're gonna have to answer Naming what we do and our labor is no longer required So we know the history of robots when we thought about robots before they were gonna come and take all the crap jobs Right all the jobs at the bottom that nobody wants and that was going to free us up as human beings to do wonderful things Except now we know that's not what's gonna happen What's gonna happen is they're gonna hollow out so many middle-class jobs across retail across banking cross journalism taxation law and to put that in context one US firm recently retrospectively applied e-discovery software to its cases and it found that it's human lawyers who are only 60% accurate compared to the software So we know the direction of travel there and the question is going to be what we do when our labor is no longer required But more importantly, we also need to ask questions about the changing nature of capital and labor In 1891 our Karl Marx asked does the worker in a cotton factory produce any cotton? No, he produces capital He produces values which serve in you to command his work and to create by means of it new value So I think if Marx was alive today in the age of Google he'd be asking this When you email are you only corresponding? No, you're producing capital You're producing values would serve a new to command your work and to create by means of it new values We're all shadow employees of the new digital services that you guys are creating And you know in the beginning that didn't matter much because we were all seduced by free We didn't realize the emergent value we were creating for technology companies. So we were kind of happy with the service And then a little bit further in the journey. We realized well if we're not paying for the service We are the product, but we were too deeply embedded in the platform to extricate ourselves But now and in the near future I think forces are colliding that are going to drive new emergent business models in the technology center Because if we have citizens living in a very uncertain world where capital and productivity are rising steeply and labor is falling sharply and Covered with the rise of robotics and automation in a world where their labor is no longer required. Do you think they're going to be happy Giving you all all their data so that you can drive more and make emergent value out of it Not when we know that most of the technology companies are Putting so much money into space expression space exploration. That's where their profits are going Is it because they envisage a future where they'll be there and we'd all be left behind? Of course This future has been shown to us in the fictitious film Elysium Where in the future the world is divided into a place where the wealthy elite are living on another planet and We who've been left behind are scrambling over scarce resources and doing all the lowly grunge work to suit our Elysian overlords So is that really science fiction? Is it really far-fetched? Well look at the strides that SpaceX is making it's amazing or why are Google and Fidelity investing a billion into SpaceX or Amazon putting two million into space exploration and it's always a bit of a scary thought when secondary services are already being developed So here we have PayPal back in 2013 with their intergalactic currency So we now have intergalactic currency Before Elon Musk has even gotten Mars and remember Elon Musk is fond of saying I want to die on Mars Just not on impact And the reason I'm saying this is because I'm trying to inject a sense of urgency into discussions about techno ethics Because if we haven't come to terms with the ethical underpinnings of our technology today How could we possibly look at an ethical framework for future planets? And if you think you're going to be covered by the outer space treaty which was written in 1966 and Says that space is to be carved out for the benefit of all mankind. I don't really think that's the way it's going to work out. I Think our digital overlords right are going to climb into their space shuttles and the last thing we'll see before they leave is This but what about now? What about not waiting for the brave new world? What about the near future for us? What can we do as a technology community? I think we need to provide leadership Leadership around questions about ethics and transparency. I think we really need new business models that big privacy in from the beginning and That move away from a winner takes all to redistributed redistribution of digital dividends And you know corporate social responsibility is nothing new We've had it for over 30 years for over 30 years. We've admonished companies who exported their waste abroad You know we have hard the environmental and social impact that that causes but we export our psychological waste with impunity If you look at Facebook with 1 billion users who are uploading 2.4 million pieces of content every minute of every day and In the heart of that data is the dark side of humanity and somebody has to clean that up so that all of us can have our sanitized Facebook experience But that's not cleaned up by Facebook employees It's cleaned up by outsourced content moderators in the Philippines who get paid a dollar an hour This is a quote from one of them where she says it's like a sewer and all of the mess and the dirt and the waste of the World flows towards you and you have to clean it Surely we can do better than this in the technology community Ethics has driven our society for centuries Why should technology be different? Are we granting technology such an indulged and privileged place that the normal ethical principles don't apply? Our thought has said we are what we repeatedly do Excellence then is not an act, but I have it. I Think of the technology community. We need to repeatedly ask ethical questions We need to make sure that ethics is included in the core curriculum for all computer scientists and engineers and Economics too so that the future business services and the future models that we have are drawn from a holistic not a Technocratic way that in place So I think the question we need to continually ask in the technology community is we can do this But should we Now at the risk of giving any of you developers out there even more of a God come complex I'd like to return For a moment just to this slide so if we were to look at the creation of Adam in a modern context This is what we'd see isn't it? It's not God's hand. It's your hands All of you in the technology community who are creating the future and so with great power comes great responsibility sorry I Work as an associate with Ernst and young in London and one of the things that we're currently doing is Trying to look at what we call a good governance index, you know What does good look like in this space? What does good look like in big data? How can we make sure that we're developing something that is going to be for society's great good and not just for for harm and so if any of you are interested in joining me in that discussion Please do follow me on Twitter and I'll put up the EY Twitter handle in a minute I wanted to close just by sharing with you a couple of the influences really for this talk In case you might want to read any further Sharon Lennie is working who owns the future has some wonderful examples of how we can look at micro licensing content back to people So that we can give them a return for their data The rise of the robots, which is a great document In terms of the hollowing out of the middle class and raw deal by Steve Hill Which I highly recommend and it's a total taked out of the sharing economy and the pressures on contingent labor and where that's going Frank Lasquale's work, which I mentioned where he talks about the black box society and Paul Graham's book hackers and painters, which is a wonderful description of developers and program programmers And finally the rise of the humans, which is a wonderful book written by Microsoft's Dave Coughlin And I'd like to pay Dave credit because really he was reading that book that brought me to the view that we Really need to start talking techno ethics Thank you Very interesting and very enlightening just to see the societal impact that Data and technology can have a very different view in terms of I'll say the the impact you can have the impact you could be part over the change You can help drive with technology and with data. So a different view of that